Hot Tub Poker

It’s Friday night. My sister, Jess, is supposed to take me to dinner to celebrate my birthday. I get to her house, look at her veil and wedding shoes, and we talk about where we should go.
“I can’t decide between Panda Express or IHOP,” I tell her.
“Ooooh, pancakes!” she exclaims.
“But the thing is, if we go to Panda, then I won’t feel like I have to eat everything and I can just take the leftovers home. If we go to IHOP, then I’ll have hot pancakes and they will get soggy if I save them, so I will feel like I have to eat everything, and then I’ll just be fat, with no leftovers.”
She somehow convinces me to go to IHOP, even though I like fried rice better than waffles. We get in her car, go about four blocks, and then she swerves into the driveway of Taco Bell.
“I said I wanted waffles, not tacos.”
“I know, but I have to mail these.” She points to the big mail truck stopped near the parking lot of Taco Bell.
“You just saw a mail truck, so you decided to pull over and give him your letters?”
“No, there’s a blue drop off box.” Which is true, but it is currently being blocked by the mail truck since he is picking up the mail. My sister gets out of the car, runs up to the side of the mail truck because it is about to pull away, and says, “Hey, do you have room for a few more?” From my position in the passenger seat of the car I can see the mailman’s eyebrows furrow. He takes the letters. My sister gets back in the car.
“You just handed your wedding invitations to the man driving away in a mail truck. Why didn’t you just put them in the box by your house?”
“Because this box gets picked up at 5:30, and the one by my house doesn’t get picked up till 2:30.”
I point to the clock in her car. It’s 5:47. “But Jess, it’s past 5:30. If you had put those invitations in the blue drop off box, they wouldn’t have gotten picked up till 5:30 tomorrow. If you had put them in the mail box by your house, they would’ve gotten picked up at 2:30.”
“I know, that’s why I wanted to take them here.”
I am utterly confused. “2:30 comes before 5:30. If you wanted to get them in the mail sooner, you should have put them in by your house.”
“But I didn’t. I mailed them here, and they already got picked up.”
“Because you gave them to the MAIL TRUCK! Did you know the mail truck was going to be here? If we had stopped just one minute later, you would’ve put the invitations in the blue box, and they would’ve gotten picked up at 5:30, instead of 2:30 if you had put them in the box at your house.” She makes no sense sometimes. “The ONLY reason they are in the mail now is because you caught the mailman in his mail truck as he was driving away.”
“ I know. I don’t like walking to the mail box by my house. The neighbors look at me.” So the truth comes out. I give up, and sit quietly until we get to IHOP.

The hour spent at IHOP was incredibly funny, but I’m not going to write about all of it. These are the important parts: I go to the bathroom and when I come back, Jess is on the phone. After I sit down, I ask her, “Is that my fake brother?” She nods and tells Travis what I said. He says something about me being his imaginary sister. Without talking to each other, we both tell Jess something along the lines of “We’ll just pretend like the other person doesn’t exist.”
When choosing off of the menu, we notice some holiday pancakes with red and green sprinkles. This causes us to invent “Party Pancakes,” which are like funfetti cake. You would mix sprinkles in the batter so that they are all polka-dotty, and then you put whip cream and more sprinkles on top. Yum, right?
I leave some of my pancakes on my plate, because I could not fit them in my stomach. Our waitress comes back to see if we were done, and my sister surprises me by pointing to the sad looking eggs and mushed pancake on my plate and saying “Could we get a box, I think I could feed that to a critter.” The waitress nods, a bit confused, then leaves.
“Feed it to a critter?” I ask.
“Yeah, my dog would like that.”
“You’re going to get a to go box for your dog?”
“Yes,” she says, like that’s normal. I pester her about it some more.
“A lot of people get to go boxes for their dogs. At work, I have people ask me all the time to box up the fat from their steak to take home.”
“You have people ask you to wrap up the fat from their food so they can take it home?” I cannot believe this. Such things I never knew.
What happens is, we wait for a long time for a box that never arrives. I get impatient and we go to pay, leaving the disgusting remains of my eggs and pancakes on the table, denying “a critter” of a tasty morsel.

We leave IHOP and go back to Jess’s house to go in the hot tub. We put on our swimsuits. It’s incredibly cold both in her house and outside, so I change in the bathroom then zip my coat up on over my swimsuit. I go to the kitchen and look out the window to watch Jess get the hot tub ready. When I know I cannot possibly stall any longer, I run outside in my coat and flip flops. I take off my coat and start to get in the hot tub, but as soon as I stick a toe in, I am conflicted. The contrast between the heat and the cold makes my foot seem as though it is on fire.
“It’ll sting a little at first, then it’s fine.”
“AAAHHHH. UAHHHHH.” I scream. Eventually I suffer and get all the way in. After about five minutes we settle in to play cards, because Jess has waterproof playing cards. I watch as she lays out atop the water a sheet of pink bubble wrap . It’s going to act as our floating card table. She shuffles the cards underwater, and then I deal them out so we can play Screw Your Neighbor. I win. Next we play Egyptian Rat Screw, or Rats Crew, depending on who you are. I win at that, too. Jess whines because she always loses.
“Hey, if you want to come up with the game to play, just tell me. But you don’t know any games.” She tries to construct a house of cards on the floating bubble wrap.
“Let’s make up a game,” she says, so she shuffles the cards underwater again and deals them out. “It’ll be like Indian Poker.” It takes some working out to decide how to play since we don’t have chips, but in the end we decide that you can bet your cards, and whoever collects the most cards wins.
We hold the wet cards up to our foreheads, then find that they will stick there. She never seems to have a card lower than a 6. I always have 3s or 5s. At first, I always make the initial bet, but then I decide maybe I can figure out what my card is my gauging the reaction on her face. She bets first from then on, and seems to win a lot.
“Don’t you feel like we’re in some sort of tribal ritual?” I ask. Because we’ve got these peacock type cards stuck to our foreheads, we’re sitting in steaming water in the dark of night, and this light from the hot tub is shining up from the floor.
“Ooooh, oooh, eee ha ha, ooooh oooh, eee ha ha,” I imitate from that scene in Finding Nemo where the fish in the tank initiate Nemo into their little club. We keep playing, and then I seem to run out of cards. Jess still has a stack.
“Hey, where’d my chips go?” I look around on the bubble wrap table. I look in the water to see if they’d sunk.
Jess says to me, very gravely, “Jo, you haven’t won any.” It’s the funniest line of the entire night. As soon as she says it, we burst into silent laughter. We’re laughing so hard we’re not making a sound. I clutch my side and move to the edge of the hot tub to breathe. I look over at her. She’s dying. Eventually we calm down.
“Seriously, I didn’t know I hadn’t won even one time until you said that. I seriously thought I had some chips.” I was having so much fun that I was oblivious to the fact that I was losing. Yeah, I knew she had better cards than me, but I thought I had won a hand at least a few times.
To start on a more even playing ground, we decide to divide the cards out equally so we get the same amount of Aces, Kings, Queens, Jacks, tens, and so on. We play a game of Go Fish to sort the cards. I win with 14 pairs. Then we separate the cards, saying, “pick up a pair of twos, pick up a pair of threes, and so on.”
“We’re being incredibly methodical, here,” I say to her. She laughs. “No really, we are exhibiting higher level thinking.” I say this because I’m thinking of my 4th grade students and how they don’t seem to have a pattern or a plan when solving math problems.
We shuffle our pairs, then continue playing Indian Poker. Halfway through the came we notice two dark figures come out of the house next to us. They go to their truck, which is parked in a way so that when the headlights turn on, they will shine right on us, like critters about to become road kill.
“Hide! Hide!” my sister says. She sinks low into the hot tub. The engine has revyed up. Where am I supposed to go? It’s a hot tub. I don’t want to get my head wet, so I’m not going to go underwater. Desperately, I flatten my body against one of the sides and turn my head so my face is away from the truck. The headlights turn on. It’s like there is a spot light directly on the hot tub.
“This is awkward,” I whisper. It takes about two minutes for the person to drive off. “Geez,” I say when they’re gone, “What if you and your boyfriend were having a make out session? No privacy there.”
We reposition the floating coffee table and continue playing. The most amazing thing happens, because I WIN THE GAME OF INDIAN POKER! I splash up out of the water, stand on the highest level of the hot tub, hold my arms up in the air, and yell “I WON!” It is a triumphant moment. I wish you could have been there to see me.
We stayed in the hot tub for about another 40 minutes, talking about random things. I decided that Jess and I will jointly hold a “Party Pancake Poker Soak” in which we will prepare pancakes with brightly colored sprinkles and whip cream for dinner, then we will get in the hot tub and play card games. Anybody reading this right now is invited, unless your name is Melvin or you have a burly amount of chest hair. I don’t know when such a glorious night will once again be held, but you should start to be like me and keep your swimsuit/trunks in a bag in the back of your car so you can do things on a moment’s notice.